Project MUSE to Re-Launch Enhanced Journal Hosting Service
By Project MUSE
Project MUSE is pleased to announce expanded and enhanced journal hosting services for 2021. Originally introduced in 2015, MUSE’s hosting service has provided an option for publishers to place journals on the MUSE platform outside of its renowned Journal Collections Program.
Project MUSE will introduce new, streamlined hosting fees for 2021 in order to make the services more accessible to a wider variety of non-profit publishers. In addition, MUSE will include more sales and marketing services for its hosting clients. “We want to help our publishers find the right readers for their content. We realize that in addition to the promotion of our hosted content, we need to add a more robust sales and marketing component,” said Elizabeth Brown, Publisher Relations Manager at Project MUSE. “We will leverage MUSE’s talented and experienced sales and customer support teams—they are our not-so-secret sauce for connecting with the library community.”
The changes to the program result directly from consultation with both current client publishers and prospective participants, in an effort to assess the 5-year-old program. “We’re thrilled that publishers are already responding enthusiastically,” said Kelley Squazzo, Director of Publisher Relations and Content Development for Project MUSE, of the re-tooled program. “I’m especially excited for the opportunity to grow our MUSE Open program with more open access (OA) journals.” Project MUSE anticipates a number of new OA journals to launch in 2021.
For many of its publishers, Project MUSE is not merely a beneficial aggregation but a full-service electronic journal publishing platform. Publishers such as Johns Hopkins University Press, where Project MUSE is housed as a standalone division, University of Hawaii Press, University of North Carolina Press, University of Pennsylvania Press, and the Catholic University of America Press use Project MUSE’s fulfillment services, complementary DOI management, Portico membership, and full-service metadata distribution, and many more services. A publisher can have journals content in Journal Collections, Hosted Journals, or both programs in order to take advantage of these services.
Integrated with Project MUSE books and journals in its collections, the hosted journal content benefits from being part of a larger corpus of related scholarly material, providing a seamless user experience and enhanced discovery opportunities. MUSE’s strong partnerships with others in the digital scholarship ecosystem and adherence to industry standards ensure that content on the platform can be easily found, cited, linked, and read.
“We are pleased to continue MUSE’s tradition—our mission, really—of helping non-profit journal publishers, including independent journals, navigate the scholarly publishing landscape,” said Wendy Queen, Director of Project MUSE. “Expanding journals hosting at MUSE will also provide even more flexibility for libraries. They can take advantage of additional improvements we are making for purchasing custom mixes of journal collections and individual titles.”
Journals that are currently hosted on MUSE outside of the collections include well-established titles such as Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization from the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University and CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature from the University of Hawaii Press. The MUSE hosting service is also an ideal home for newer, cutting edge titles such as The Medieval Globe from Arc Humanities Press and Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics from University of Pennsylvania Press.
Journals migrating to the Project MUSE hosted journals service for 2021 include:
• CLA Journal, College Language Association
• Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Villanova University
• Michigan Historical Review, Central Michigan University
• Perspectives of New Music, Perspectives of New Music
• Science Fiction Studies, SF-TH, Inc. (migrating to Project MUSE for 2022)
New Journals launching in the Project MUSE hosted journals service for 2021 include:
• Alliance for African Partnership Perspectives, Michigan State University Press (Open Access)
• Gendered Perspectives on International Development, Michigan State University Press (Open Access)
• Rhetoric, Politics & Culture, Michigan State University Press
Project MUSE has been an integral part of the scholarly communications ecosystem for 25 years, providing libraries with affordable access to vetted, essential scholarship from its community of respected not-for-profit publishers. In an era of continuous change, MUSE’s mission - the sustainable dissemination of trusted content - remains constant. By distributing the significant majority of its revenue from library purchases directly back to its university-based publishers, MUSE returns a great deal of value to the system of scholarship, rather than extracting it. Project MUSE invests in maintaining a platform that provides for crucial needs of discoverability and accessibility, complies with major information standards, and offers library-friendly and user-friendly terms.
